


Lily Potter and the Ghostbane Curse

by Mollz



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dementors, Early Chapter Angst, Gen, Ghosts, Gryffindor James Sirius Potter, Master of Death, New Take on Dementors, New Take on Ghosts, No Romance, Post-Canon, Slytherin Albus Severus Potter, The Deathly Hallows
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-27
Packaged: 2019-02-20 14:19:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13148451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mollz/pseuds/Mollz
Summary: Lily's parents already hated that she spent so much time studying death.If they found out how much time she spent with Dementors, her life was over.But she knew that she was onto something important. And that was enough.





	1. Prologue: A Cold Winter Night

The glass of the window shattered spectacularly, eliciting screams and gasps from the unsuspecting portraits. A moment later, in flew a cloaked figure--no, a Dementor--with its arms wrapped around a girl. It floated over the broken glass covering the floor and set the girl down on her feet next to the desk, where she immediately folded inwards in pain, one arm wrapped around her stomach and the other bracing herself against the hardwood surface.

“Can someone...please...get my dad?” Lily Potter asked.

Half the portraits needed no further instruction and were gone in an instant. Lily slowly pulled out a chair and lowered herself into it, trembling.

The Dementor seemed confused. It looked around at the walls, then at Lily, and floated slowly away from her. Lily took no notice, eyes clenched tight and chest heaving with deep breaths. Her clothes were battered and torn. Her skin was marred with red lines that looked like burns. On her face, it was impossible not to notice--two thick diagonal streaks met and crossed at the bridge of her nose, leaving her with an X that stretched from her hairline to her jawline.

“What’s this commotion?” The portrait of Phineas Nigellus demanded, as he appeared in his frame. “What in god’s--why is there a Dementor in the Headmaster’s office?”

At this prompting, Lily raised her head and opened her eyes to look at the Dementor. “You have to go.” She told it, sounding apologetic.

The Dementor drifted closer and reached out to just brush her shoulder with its fingers.

“I know.” Lily’s shoulders slumped for a moment, before tensing again with pain. “You’ve done so, so much, Victoria. Thank you. But you can’t...if they see you, it’ll only upset them. I’ll be okay.”

The Dementor lifted up its sleeve to reveal a bracelet made of small glowing balls.

“Can you--agh!” Lily whimpered and shut her eyes tight for a few seconds, before continuing. “Can you really hold it for that long?”

The Dementor didn’t visibly respond.

Lily nodded and halfway sat up. She pulled an unfamiliar wand out of her cloak, concentrated hard, and whispered, “expecto patronum.”

Silver light burst from the wand and washed over the Dementor. It seemed to shrink, then its black cloak became gray, became faint, and disappeared. Underneath was a silvery-transparent young woman wearing an old fashioned dress, with a look of the deepest concern on her face. She pressed her hands over her mouth and gazed around at the staring portraits on the walls with fear and embarrassment.

A small shudder and gasp from Lily, who had already begun to curl up again as pain wracked her body, broke the shocked silence. The ghost forgot the portraits in an instant and turned back to Lily.

“What can I do?” She asked quickly. She put a hand on Lily’s back and rubbed it gently. “There has to be something, I can’t just watch you--” She squeaked as Lily had a sudden spasm of agony.

“Don’t.” Lily said firmly. Her head was bowed and both her fists were clenched. “You know better. Focus. Distract me. Please. What did you used to do?”

“Do?” The ghost was perplexed.

“For a living. A job.” Lily said. The pain eased for a moment, and her breathing softened. “Or a hobby.”

“I...I was a baker.” The ghost shook off some lingering confusion and kept rubbing Lily’s back. “I baked things, sweet things.”

“Really?” Lily seemed cheered by the idea. “Did you like baking?”

“Oh, I loved it.” The ghost seemed to lighten in color a shade as it smiled. “So many wonderful smells. I liked that it made people happy, my fiance had such a sweet tooth…” She trailed off, and darkened again. The faint outline of a dark cloak covered her frame. Her hand stalled on Lily’s back.

“Victoria, _happy_.” Lily snapped. “Focus.”

“I’m sorry.” The ghost shook her head violently and returned to her gentle stroking. “I, um, baking, I love baking, my little brother couldn’t stand it so I always got his pocket change by trade.”

“Brother!” Lily said encouragingly, even as she lowered herself out of the chair onto her hands and knees and struggled for breath. “Tell me about your...your family.”

“I had a younger brother-” Victoria was cut off by a loud whimper from Lily, but continued after a moment. “A, a younger brother and an older brother, and three younger sisters, and a cat.”

“Uh-huh?” Lily was shaking hard. She leaned in and touched her forehead against the floor, her breath coming in dry sobs. Victoria looked impatiently at the empty fireplace.

“M-my younger brother wanted to name the cat...McWhiskers.” Victoria said. Her voice was uncertain and fearful. “But we, um, I s-suggested--”

Lily wrapped her arms around her torso, curled up on her side and screamed. Victoria covered her mouth with both hands in abject horror.

10 seconds. 15 seconds. The screaming finally subsided. Lily’s gasping for air was now thick and wet as tortured tears streamed liberally down her face.

Lily mumbled something inaudible.

“What?” Victoria asked. Her voice trembled.

“Whadju...name...the cat?” Lily asked. She slumped bonelessly onto her back and opened her watery eyes to stare at the ceiling.

“W-w-we, um.” Glistening tears streaked down Victoria’s ghostly face, disappearing as soon as they left her skin. “N-named him Dumpling.”

The quiet tension of the moment gave way to a clamor of action. A roaring fire burst into the fireplace, and from it two adults emerged. Victoria flew backwards to float uncertainly next to the wall as the man knelt down and with an agonized “ _Lily!_ ” embraced his daughter.

Lily was pawed over and picked up and carried away with a flurry of motion that was expedient and desperate. In hardly a minute’s time, the office was empty of people once more.

The ghost floated slowly over to the fireplace. “I’m sorry.” She told it. Her breath hitched. “I should’ve been able to--I can’t save anyone--”

She buried her face in her hands. The black cloak of a Dementor formed over her, until there was nothing human left visible. The Dementor floated in place for a long moment, then leaned in to pick something up off the carpet. The glowing bracelet from before. It silently slipped the bracelet back onto its wrist, then slipped out of the shattered windows of the office, into the cold December night.


	2. Chapter 1: The Cloak of Invisibility

**Rewind.**

Lily was eight years old when she found the first Deathly Hallow.

She had always been quite prone to cold, especially as a child. Her winter pastime was to sit in front of a roaring fire under a pile of blankets and complain if anyone so much as hinted at her going outside. In fact, the first sign of her magic had been lighting small, inexplicable fires when she needed to warm her hands. (Her parents quickly learned to buy her warmer cloaks.)

But simply lying around being warm did get old after a while, so on one winter morning her brother Albus was able to convince her to play dress-up with their parents clothes while they were out. 

It was great fun putting on cloaks and hats that were far too big for them. Albus waddled around in their dad’s suit, wiggling the slack sleeves at her while she tried to figure out how to put a tie on him like she’d always seen their mum do. She tried on some of her mum’s lipstick and eyeshadow and showed it off to Albus, who almost fell over laughing. 

She was rummaging in the walk-in closet for a dress she could try on when she spotted it: a hat box hidden in the back underneath a stack of old sweaters. She pulled it out and opened it up at once. 

The thing inside was silvery and smooth. She stretched it out and found that it was a cloak. She dropped the blanket she’d been draping around her shoulders and pulled the cloak around her. 

To her delight, she found that it was wonderfully warm inside. It pooled a bit at her feet, meant for someone much taller, but that wasn’t so bad. She hiked it up so that she wouldn’t trip over it and walked out to show Albus. 

A revelation. A heated discussion about “finder’s-keepers”. An agreement to keep it away from James at all costs. The details would all become hazy and exaggerated with time. 

If their father noticed that the hatbox in the corner of his closet contained only a moth-eaten blanket from Lily’s pile of winter quilts, he never said so to his children. 

* * *

 

Lily had always been quite prone to cold, especially as a child. She shivered and turned bright red and her feet went icy with the slightest provocation. So when, at nine years old, the forest behind her house took on a strange and inappropriate chill, she didn’t find it peculiar. When ice began to form on the trees around her, she smiled in appreciation at the invisibility cloak (which she had taken to constantly wearing underneath her normal cloak, simply for warmth) and assumed it was just a particularly chilly Autumn. 

She had less explanation for the enormous black figure she saw when she turned on the path. It towered over her, no less than 10 feet tall. Its face was masked in shadow under its ragged black cloak. 

It turned to look at her, or rather, it turned its head in her direction. She felt rooted to the ground. Her trembling hands pulled the two cloaks tighter around herself. 

The creature--for it had to be, that couldn’t be a person, not the way it moved--floated towards her a few feet, then stopped. Its hood moved in a way that almost suggested it was cocking its head to the side. It reached out a gray, scabbed hand towards her, and she took a few stumbling steps back. It paused. 

“W-who are you?” She asked. She felt scared and sick inside. Something about this creature felt wrong.

It floated silently for a moment. It reached out its hand again, and again she stepped backwards.

“Leave me alone.” She told it. She tried to sound firm. 

There was no visible response. 

She took a few experimental steps back. It didn’t move. She took a few more, then turned around and ran back towards the house.

The creature didn’t follow. 

Her father turned ashen when she described it to him, and left the house immediately while her mother forced a cup of hot chocolate into her hand. When she had finished the drink, her mother explained that Dementors were horrid, dark magical creatures. That they fed by draining the happiness out of the world, and sometimes they would even suck souls out of a person.

When her father returned, he told her that Dementors were malignant brutes that haunted the Earth, and that she should never face one by herself until she was a good deal older and had a wand and he had taught her how to make a Patronus. 

None of them were allowed in the forest without an escort for years afterwards. James was furious.

* * *

 

Lily had always been quite prone to cold, especially as a child. So it was quite strange to find herself bolting awake in the middle of the night, days before her 10th birthday, drenched in sweat. 

In her dreams, Albus was lying in a hospital bed, his skin a pale gray, chest barely moving as he breathed. By his bedside lay an enormous black dog. When she entered, it looked up at her, and its silver eyes gleamed like moonlight. It nodded to her, then lumbered to its feet and hopped up on the bed. It bit through Albus’s neck like butter. She screamed and reached out, only to find herself waking up in her own bed.

She didn’t tell anyone about that dream, but it stayed with her, forever just as vivid as it had been upon waking. She forcefully put it out of her mind until two months later, when Albus started getting very, very sick. 

His first year of school had been going well. He was making friends. He was staying out of trouble. He was so excited to come home and tell her all the things he’d been learning. He had a chest cold, but he thought he was getting over it. 

She knew something was wrong when he stepped onto the platform to meet them on the first day of winter break. It wasn’t just a chest cold. He looked too pale. He was shivering under three layers, including the invisibility cloak which she had let him take to school after much cajoling. He smiled and gave her a big hug, but she couldn’t shake the weight in her chest. She had the same horrible wrongness feeling that had come over her when she’d met the Dementor. 

He was admitted to St. Mungos just two days after Christmas. He had gotten her a lovely book about magical creatures. She had gotten him a Slytherin scarf. It hung on the coat rack of his hospital room as the Healers quietly spoke to their parents in Very Serious Tones. 

The last time she saw him, two weeks after New Years, she felt an overwhelming wave of deja vu. She entered the room, and there he was, lying in his hospital bed. His skin was gray, and his chest barely moved as he breathed. But there was no dog lying on the ground. And when he passed on in front of her eyes, it was not some gruesome bite, but the final victory of a terrible illness. 

She had always been quite prone to cold. That made the spike of ice which pierced her heart especially unbearable. 

She was dragged out of the hospital room screaming his name. Her parents tried to comfort her, but she couldn’t be comforted. Not even the invisibility cloak could protect her from feeling the loss of her best friend, the frostbitten hole it left in her chest. 

Her mother telling her that it would be alright offered her no comfort.

Her father’s explanation that death was natural and Albus was in a better place fell on deaf ears.

Weeks passed and she couldn't hear his name without bursting into tears, or even look at the door of his room. Her magic began to manifest in erratic ways, turning her clothes black and growing ice on her walls as she slept. 

Strangely, it was her parents’ friend Neville who finally helped her begin to process her grief. 

“I went through some horrible things when I was younger.” He told her solemnly. “Some days, it’s too much to think about. I try to...kind of...distance myself from it. I pretend like those things happened to somebody else. Sometimes I’ll even write about it like I’m writing an essay about some historical event.” He looked down at his hands. “Everyone goes through...things like this. My generation especially. I know how much it hurts. But you can let it consume you, or you can carry on. I know which one Albus would want from you.”

She tried it. She wrote down her experiences like she was a researcher describing them to a colleague. She described every detail, including her dream, her strange feelings, the layout of the hospital room. And slowly, she started feeling more at peace with what had happened. But slowly, she also began to realize just how bizarre death was. 

To muggles, death was a simple thing, the end of thought and life. But it was hard to describe what death meant for a wizard. A portrait could replicate to an extent the personality of someone who had been dead for centuries. The philosopher’s stone had helped Nicolas Flamel stay alive for almost seven hundred years. Voldemort had returned a decade after his demise--that was a story she’d learned simply growing up in the Potter household. Souls were eternal and sacred, and yet somehow they could be removed and destroyed by Dementors. And most peculiar of all was the existence of ghosts. 

Ghosts were neither alive nor dead, stuck in some kind of halfway point. They could never be killed, but also could never touch the world or eat or feel warmth again. They were a topic that people seemed not to like to talk about. There were thousands of records of known ghosts, but the fundamental questions went unaddressed. Why did some people become ghosts? Could you become a ghost if a Dementor removed your soul? What had ghosts experienced when they died? Was it better or worse to be stuck as a ghost? Was the decision irrevocable? 

Her father was distressed when she tried to ask him these questions. He assured her, again, with increasingly strong language, that death was important and that dying was a good thing. He said, in the uncomfortable roundabout language that he had always used while speaking about certain parts of the war, that he had had...personal experience with what came just after death, and he knew that souls were better off being at peace. He then retreated back to his office for the night, refusing to say any more.

She believed him. She did. She believed that Albus was in a better place, that he should be left alone, that she would see him again one day. The conviction of her father impressed it on her. But even as the grief waned, the curiosity only got stronger. 

“I just want to know-”

“God damn it, Lily!” James shouted across the dinner table, slamming his fist down next to his plate. “Stop talking about it!”

The silence that followed was deafening. The sound of her mother not scolding James for screaming at her rung in her ears like church bells. 

They were all in agreement. Death was something she wasn’t meant to speak about or ask about. It was something to be silently accepted and repressed.

She would have to find other avenues of information for her research.


End file.
